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Believe nothing

“Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense.” -Buddha

That quote by Buddha is one of my favorites, and I apply that reasoning to my life on a regular basis. Not believing in anything without deeply thinking about it has helped me form a much more rational view of the world than I ever would have if I had just listened to what other people “believe.” Or at least I believe that to be the case.

One of the things that I always find shocking is how many people just adopt a belief without even thinking it through.
It seems to me that there are a lot of mysteries in this life, and mysteries bother people. Instead of recognizing that there are some questions that just can’t be answered, a lot of people like to try to wrap things up in a neat little package with a tidy explanation that they will argue until they’re blue in the face. I’m not just talking about religion either. Some of the biggest “believers” I’ve ever met actually don’t believe in religion.
They claim to be too intelligent to believe what they consider to be ancient fairy tales, but they’ll quote every wacky theory on alien abductions and talk in depth about how the ancient Sumerians documented the creation of human beings from lower primates by Aliens mixing their DNA into them.

Ever since I was a little kid I’ve been obsessed with UFOs and aliens. I would watch every show about them that would air on TV, and when I first got onto the internet way back in 1994 on with AOL and a 14.4 baud modem one of the first very first things I did online was download UFO documents. The first night I got online I stayed up all night like a retard downloading and printing what I thought to be important documents on “the truth.” I was sleepy the next day working on the set of “newsradio” because I was obsessed with stories about aliens.
I’m still very much interested in the subject, but I have a completely different take on it now. Back then; I was convinced that UFOs were real, and I would argue the point until I had a heart attack.
Today I have a completely different take on it. I’m not saying that I don’t believe in UFOs, but I am saying that I don’t believe most of the people that say they’ve seen UFOs.

Have you ever seen that show “UFO Hunters?” It’s one of my guilty pleasures.
One of the things about it that is so interesting to me is that the guys looking for the UFOs really, really believe in them.
A lot of these guys have been looking for aliens their whole life, and most of them have never even actually seen anything themselves. They’re just studying evidence.
These dudes have spent most of their lives going over grainy photos of what looks like hubcaps tossed through the air. I mean, have you ever seen any of the evidence? It looks like shit.
They got crystal clear video of a guy from Seinfeld yelling out “Nigger!” and they can’t get a single cool video of a UFO? They all look like shit.
Looking at it as an objective observer, it always seems to me that a lot of these “UFO researcher” guys on these TV shows are just seeing what they want to see. They’re studying grainy photos saying shit like, “If you look here, it appears to have some sort of magnetic propulsion system…”
Right.
Or… that’s a fucking hubcap, and you’re retarded.
That’s a hubcap dangling from a string, and you’ve wasted the last 20 years of your life studying a bunch of crazy liars. That’s pretty possible too, dude.

Now, I’m not saying that all UFOs sightings are fake, because how could I possibly know that?
No one knows. It’s impossible to know, there’s just too much space out there. The possibilities are endless. The possibility that there are intergalactic travelers that occasionally visit earth is certainly believable to me. I mean, just look at what we humans can do, and we’re fucking retarded.
Who would have ever thought the same species responsible for the KKK, Fox news, and suicide bombers would also be able to figure out how to get people into space? That’s pretty fucking crazy. The way I look at it when it comes to alien space travelers is that there’s levels to everything. Monkeys are a million times smarter than worms, we humans are about a million times smarter than monkeys, Nicola Tesla was a million times smarter than Sarah Palin, and it’s entirely possible that there’s something out there in space that’s a million times smarter than him. Literally anything is possible. It might not even have a physical form. Intergalactic traveling alien life could be a super intelligent entity that exists in the form of a living idea. There might be alien life out there that’s so alien we can’t even perceive it any more than ants can see you when you wave your hand over them.
It might not even exist on a frequency we can register. Intelligent alien life might very well be around us all the time, but operating in a completely different domain.
To me that seems much more likely to be what alien life is going to be like. It’s going to be REALLY fucking alien. It’s probably not going to buzz cornfields in a flying hubcap hoping to be captured on film.

I had this idea in my isolation tank once that alien life is probably not going to come here in a ship, but rather travel as an idea and go directly into our minds. I’ve had some psychedelic experiences where I felt like ideas were actually living things, or a part of a single living, gigantic thing and that every single piece of creative work ever done by people is actually all connected by the same string of consciousness, but to follow it and see the connection you would have to put together every single person contribution that’s ever lived. Of course this would be impossible for a person to do – but if they could connect it all they would see that all human life is just one great work. What I thought was that we think of ideas as being these abstract, lifeless constructions, but what if they’re actually a life form. What if creativity is actually a living thing; that it’s a symbiotic life form that lives along side us and relies on our ability to tune into it for its procreation. It doesn’t give birth to babies, but it impregnates our minds with creations; art, comedy, innovations, inventions, inspirations – always inspiring activity and feeding off its past accomplishments to create an ever more advanced and complex material world.
That we need to feed off the cells of vegetable and animal life in order to stay alive, it needs to motivate human beings to create for it’s survival and evolution.

It might just be that our own personal filters are so coarse – protecting us from thinking about all the potential variables in our lives and in our environment – that we don’t have enough left over awareness to tune in to our actual thoughts and monitor them thoroughly.
That’s one of the most amazing things about the isolation tank. When you get in that thing it removes the entire world. No touching, no seeing, no hearing, no weight – all of your thoughts completely un-tethered from the signals of the primate body.
And when you do that thoughts become a very different thing. They don’t roll in and scroll down like text on a movie screen. It’s much more like you’re laying down in a river of consciousness, and wave after wave of thoughts just roll over and bury you with ideas. You try to decipher this torrent of ideas into a way that you can recreate later, and you try to hold on to the good ones as much as you can, but in order for the trip to work you can’t guide it. You gotta just let it all go.

If you stop and write something down or even just concentrate on it too much, you’ll lose the connection to the source. Your ego steps in trying to control the situation, and it’s self centered thoughts of trying to record and preserve ideas are the wrong frequency to keep the connection with the wave. You try to remember what you can, but you really have to just let it go and ride out the experience.

What’s really important isn’t just that you learn something from the trip, but also that you can let go and surrender control to that moment. When you get deep enough into a tank experience to have that happen it really feels like you’re in contact with a living organism, and the only way to tune into the frequency it operates on is to completely abandon your ego and abandon all ideas about control, and just give in to it.
It’s really hard to do, because it feels freaky as fuck. It can be very scary to let everything go. There are layers and layers of control that we exercise on ourselves and our thoughts and our perceptions of reality, and when you abandon them all, slowly, one at a time with a steady and balanced effort over a long enough time to allow you to keep this focus going and get really, really deep – you feel like there’s a lot of shit out there, just out of reach. The more you can let go, the more you can tune in, and the more you tune in, the more you think you might possibly be going insane. On a regular basis I experience things that are absolutely beyond description and completely defy logic. But they happen, and they happen to me all the time. I don’t have to take any drug, I just get in the isolation tank and relax, and slowly let go, and go deeper and deeper into the connection that my consciousness has with the energy of the universe until I break through the lowest membrane of control and drop down into the current of ideas and bathe in it’s love.

I think it’s entirely possible that we’re connected not just to our fellow humans, but also to everything, including things we haven’t even recognized or considered, like ideas.
I’ve always said that when I’m at my best performing stand up it feels like I’m just “tuning it in,” and that I don’t exist anymore. I just become these ideas and let them flow out of me. It’s a crazy feeling, and it comes and goes during a performance, but when it’s “on” it’s the one of the most magical feelings a performer can experience. Funny shit just comes flying out of your mouth in the perfect order far faster than it seems you could have ever thought of it. It comes out intact and perfectly timed. It just happens sometimes, and it really doesn’t feel like you’re doing it. It really feels like you’re tuning something in. I buy that, but UFOs and abduction stories – not so much.

We had this thing we did on this CBS show that I hosted called “Game Show in My Head” where we had people do funny things with hidden cameras and one of them was a thing where the contestant had to pretend to be a news reporter and get a person on the street to lie about seeing a UFO. Just watching these people willingly, easily lie about their UFO experience just because they knew they were going to be on TV changed my thoughts about how many of the UFO stories I believed. I haven’t discounted the possibility entirely, but man it’s disturbing to see how easily people lie about shit like that.
It was SO easy for them to do. People just started talking – “Oh, it’s was hovering in the sky, and it came down and they took me aboard”… straight faced, no smile. Just lied out of their ass. Not just one person, but a lot of people. Not only did they lie, but when they found out it was a hidden camera show and that their lies would be exposed on camera to the whole world, they STILL agreed to sign the waiver. There are a lot of us out there that are just plain full of shit, and we have to factor that into the equation whenever we’re looking into anything crazy, like UFOs, or Bigfoot, or black republicans.
Always remember that there’s an incredible amount of people out there that are either nuts, or full of shit. Whenever you hear a wacky story, you’ve always gotta throw those two variables into the mix.
In the end, I think Buddha said it best.

Now, of course the ironic thing about me posting that quote from Buddha, is that I think to a lot of folks reading what I wrote it probably sounds like a bunch of crazy nonsense. I guess the important thing though is that it makes sense to me.